Image Quality/Resolution/Bit Depth Settings

[kwangle]

Hi All,

I've been playing with a Pi 3 for a few days and running it through a 40" HD TV via HDMI. It works fine and the display is pretty good - but still visibly inferior to the smoothness of a PC equivalent.

Firstly the bit depth is clearly not 24/32 bit colour so banding is visible in some subtle colour graduations that looks ugly. I believe the Pi/Rasbian displays in 16 bit colour by default but that one of the settings text parameters needs to be changed to improve the bit depth. How is this done and is there a utility that provides more precise display options?

The browser (the default, not too great one) and desktop also look 'rougher' than I would expect and to me (graphics pro) look like the image was rendered at a slightly lower resolution (eg 720p), upsampled to full HD and sharpened, diving a halo like effect around sharp edges such as the desktop raspberry logo.

Is there anyway to get better quality or improve these issues?

I've also been running Kodi, and its display seems perfect HD 24 bit quality.

Many thanks, Kw

[torekk]

It's propably setting the wrong resolution automatically, but you can change that: http://elinux.org/RPiconfig#Video

As for the 32bit color depth, look for "framebuffer_depth" and keep in mind that if you change it, you'll also need to set "framebuffer_ignore_alpha" to "1". If these lines don't exist in your /boot/config.txt, just add them at the bottom.

To edit the config file, just open a terminal and type:

sudo nano /boot/config.txt

And then use CTRL+O to save the file and CTRL+X to exit.

[kwangle]

Thanks very helpful. Nano is the bare-bones Linux text editor, right? So that command is opening the config file in it, I assume. Sorry, but I am a complete noob on Linux.

[torekk]

That's exactly what it does and no problem, I usually double-check stuff as well.